Polymers, because of their properties and ease of processing into complex shapes are among the most important materials available to us today and the polymer industry makes a major contribution to the UK economy (18 billion per year). An exciting new family of materials are polymer nanocomposites (NCs), in which particles with nanoscale dimensions are dispersed in the polymer. The benefits of NCs derive primarily from the exceptionally large amounts of particle surface area that can be achieved for a small addition of particles (e.g. 5% by weight). Thus they offer dramatic improvement in material performance with significant increases in mechanical and gas barrier properties. The user of such a material therefore gets a more effective product (or one containing less material for the same effectiveness). It is well recognised that the nanoparticle-polymer interface/chemistry is a critical parameter in determining the degree of dispersion of particles in a nanocomposite and that the interfacial properties have a significant influence on nanocomposite performance. In recent times, however it has become apparent that the processing route by which the nanoparticle-polymer mixture is formed into a final product is an equally important aspect of NC manufacture and this is the area on which we will focus in this proposal.The principal aim of the proposed project is therefore to achieve a fundamental understanding of the interactions between material formulation, processing and properties of polymer nanocomposites and to apply this to the development of proof of concept applications which provide generic processing information for industry and academia alike. The work will include statistically designed experimental studies using pilot scale polymer processing equipment and validation trials on industrial scale equipment. Parameters to be studied include extruder shear and temperature profiles, screw design, additives such as anti-oxidant, post extrusion deformation such as biaxial extension and cooling rates. We will characterise the materials in terms of structure, mechanical, thermal and barrier performance in order to link process to structure and structure to performance.We will utilise the combined processing, characterisation and analytical skills and facilities existing in Queen's University Belfast (QUB) and the University of Bradford (UoB), partners who have worked together successfully on large collaborative projects, in the past and currently, and have an excellent national and international track record in polymer processing research.

My vision is to enable reliable large-scale manufacturing of novel advanced organic or hybrid organic/inorganic materials which have complex three-dimensional structure. An advanced material is one with new properties that allows companies to develop novel high-value products to meet market needs, and in doing so generate growth and high-technology exports. Cutting-edge manufacturing is key to wealth creation in the UK. The UK cannot compete in the low technology (commodity) materials sector: these are now manufactured in countries with low cost labour markets. To manufacture an advanced material, we have to understand its structure in detail. This means being able to observe and measure it over many length scales (nanometres to millimetres), and then use that information to understand its physical characteristics. Once we have understood how to create a material in the laboratory setting, the next challenge is to scale-up processing capability. Often the manufacturing process itself has a big impact on the microscopic structure of the material, and hence its physical properties. This leads to a development cycle. To maintain desirable properties, process variables are changed, informed by predictive modelling and re-examination of the microscopic structure. The aim is to identify process steps that critically impact on the product output capacity and reliability. This project will work directly with industrial partners to use novel ways of discern microscopic structure so as to inform the product development cycle. The industrial partners are both large UK firms with interests in the energy sector: one working on developing polymer components for energy storage; the other working on up scaling process technologies for new types of low cost solar cells. For both materials systems, application performance success hinges on complex hierarchical structures. Scientists and engineers have realised that is often not only the material itself, but the way different structural arrangements, each at a different scale, interact with one another. As well as studying materials of immediate commercial application, this project also aims to harvest the information contained in very similar natural materials which also have complex hierarchical structures (spider silk in particular). Prior development of this class of polymers has been hampered by the absence of measurement instruments and methods capable of accurately observing their composition and complex structure. I aim to refine a new type of electron microscopy that I have developed in order to measure, from the scale of nanometres to millimetres, soft-matter properties that define their electrical and structural performance. This will be tailored to the particular needs of my industrial collaborators, but the technique will also have much wider application. For example, I will also use my method to try to unlock the exact structural mechanisms that are found in the natural material silk - which has extraordinary properties as yet it is not understood how to retain these in the man-made equivalent. With the support of a visiting civil engineering expert who has developed scalable mechanical models for complex hierarchical structures, I aim to build a scalable model that will help to predict the link between process parameter variation and resulting materials properties. This will be informed using my new characterisation method. Finally, in the light of the results from the research, I hope to pool the knowledge gained from both the industrial and academic partners to formulate a more general understanding of the development cycle for these technologically and economically important class of materials.

In the UK there are more than four billion square metres of roofs and facades forming the building envelope. Most of this could potentially be used for harvesting solar energy and yet it covers less than 1.8 % of the UK land area. The shared vision for SPECIFIC is develop affordable large area solar collectors which can replace standard roofs and generate over one third of the UK's total target renewable energy by 2020 (10.8 GW peak and 19 TWh) reducing CO2 output by 6 million tonnes per year. This will be achieved with an annual production of 20 million m2 by 2020 equating to less than 0.5% of the available roof and wall area. SPECIFIC will realise this by quickly developing practical functional coated materials on metals and glass that can be manufactured by industry in large volumes to produce, store and release energy at point of use. These products will be suitable for fitting on both new and existing buildings which is important since 50% of the UKs current CO2 emissions come from the built environment.The key focus for SPECIFIC will be to accelerate the commercialisation of IP, knowledge and expertise held between the University partners (Swansea, ICL, Bath, Glyndwr, and Bangor) and UK based industry in three key areas of electricity generation from solar energy (photovoltaics), heat generation (solar thermal) and storage/controlled release. The combination of functionality will be achieved through applying functional coatings to metal and glass surfaces. Critical to this success is the active involvement in the Centre of the steel giant Corus/Tata and the glass manufacturer Pilkington. These two materials dominate the facings of the building stock and are surfaces which can be engineered. In addition major chemical companies (BASF and Akzo Nobel as two examples) and specialist suppliers to the emerging PV industry (e.g. Dyesol) are involved in the project giving it both academic depth and industrial relevance. To maximise open innovation colleagues from industry will be based SPECIFIC some permanently and some part time. SPECIFIC Technologists will also have secondments to partner University and Industry research and development facilities.SPECIFIC will combine three thriving research groups at Swansea with an equipment armoury of some 3.9m into one shared facility. SPECIFIC has also been supported with an equipment grant of 1.2 million from the Welsh Assembly Government. This will be used to build a dedicated modular roll to roll coating facility with a variety of coating and curing functions which can be used to scale up and trial successful technology at the pre-industrial scale. This facility will be run and operated by three experienced line technicians on secondment from industry. The modular coating line compliments equipment at Glyndwr for scaling up conducting oxide deposition, at CPi for barrier film development and at Pilkington for continuous application of materials to float glass giving the grouping unrivalled capability in functional coating. SPECIFIC is a unique business opportunity bridging a technology gap, delivering affordable novel macro-scale micro-generation, making a major contribution to UK renewable energy targets and creating a new export opportunity for off grid power in the developing world. It will ultimately generate thousands high technology jobs within a green manufacturing sector, creating a sustainable international centre of excellence in functional coatings where multi-sector applications are developed for next generation manufacturing.

Soft matter and functional interfaces are ubiquitous! Be it manufactured plastic products (polymers), food (colloids), paint and other decorative coatings (thin films and coatings), contact lenses (hydrogels), shampoo and washing powder (complex mixtures of the above) or biomaterials such as proteins and membranes, soft matter and soft matter surfaces and interfaces touch almost every aspect of human activity and underpin processes and products across all industrial sectors - sectors which account for 17.2% of UK GDP and over 1.1M UK employees (BIS R&D scoreboard 2010 providing statistics for the top 1000 UK R&D spending companies). The importance of the underlying science to UK plc prompted discussions in 2010 with key manufacturing industries in personal care, plastics manufacturing, food manufacturing, functional and performance polymers, coatings and additives sectors which revealed common concerns for the provision of soft matter focussed doctoral training in the UK and drove this community to carry out a detailed "gap analysis" of training provision. The results evidenced a national need for researchers trained with a broad, multidisciplinary experience across all areas of soft matter and functional interfaces (SOFI) science, industry-focussed transferable skills and business awareness alongside a challenging PhD research project. Our 18 industrial partners, who have a combined global work force of 920,000, annual revenues of nearly £200 billion, and span the full SOFI sector, emphasized the importance of a workforce trained to think across the whole range of SOFI science, and not narrowly in, for example, just polymers or colloids. A multidisciplinary knowledge base is vital to address industrial SOFI R&D challenges which invariably address complex, multicomponent formulations. We therefore propose the establishment of a CDT in Soft Matter and Functional Interfaces to fill this gap. The CDT will deliver multidisciplinary core science and enterprise-facing training alongside PhD projects from fundamental blue-skies science to industrially-embedded applied research across the full spectrum of SOFI science. Further evidence of national need comes from a survey of our industrial partners which indicates that these companies have collectively recruited >100 PhD qualified staff over the last 3 years (in a recession) in SOFI-related expertise, and plan to recruit (in the UK) approximately 150 PhD qualified staff members over the next three years. These recruits will enter research, innovation and commercial roles. The annual SOFI CDT cohort of 16 postgraduates could be therefore be recruited 3 times over by our industrial partners alone and this demand is likely to be the tip of a national-need iceberg.